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Month of Performance Art

"An intimate group of five participants started the week exploring the three white exhibition spaces at Glogau-Air. Every morning began with intense body work, where the body was explored through improvised movements on the floor and researching exercises that included the spaces and its specific elements in dialogue with the body: slow movements, repetition, awareness, senses. After a while the participants began to interact with one another in an impulsive and intuitive way, no talking – also using sound as a part of the investigation of space.

The afternoons included a shared participatory reading of relevant theory and texts to contextualize the workshop and performance practices in general. The first day also included a visit from the Gender and the City workshop participants lead by "Cest Beau Le Pouvoir" (FR). First doing a shared walking exercise, with slow movements in space that evolved to be creating an abstract mechanism together with the other participants, then reading Guy Debords essay Towards a Situationism International (from 1957), with a small discussion afterwards.

Another central exercise was to go from natural movement into irrational behavior and back again; this was explored in various constellations during the workshop. It was also this way of acting in space that was used at the end of the week, when the participants created a collaborative video of a performative lunch taking place at Glougau-Air; here the normal act of eating was interrupted by each performer creating absurd happenings around the table, changing in and out of "normal" action.

At the end of the week the participants created their own site specific pieces at Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (ZKU), where some were performed together with the artists from the project sítios distantes (remote sites) on May 12th." // Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen / Blog from the Month of Performance Art Berlin